Mar 22, 2011

"Wikimania, the annual conference of the Wikimedia community, is set to be held in Haifa in August. Tell Wikimedia that its mission of cultivating collaboration and a shared culture cannot be furthered in a gathering held in an apartheid state that occupies and oppresses Palestinians!

Wikimania, the annual international conference of the Wikimedia community, which include Wikipedia, is set to be held in Haifa, Israel from 4-7August 2011.

Israel seems a strange choice for the annual conference, which promotes neutrality and subjectivity, collaboration, and a shared culture for participants of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and its sister projects.

The country’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip are certainly not in line with Wikimedia’s mission to promote neutral information. The annual gathering has in recent years been held in Germany (2005), USA (2006), Taiwan (2007), Egypt(2008), Argentina (2009) and Poland (2010), and a number of groups are calling on the media community to change this year’s location."